Presently, more people are being awarded masks than ribbons. This makes ribbons more desirable than masks (in theory) since they are rarer.

It was my intention for the mask award to incentivise people to put their best effort into remaining anonymous. Instead, the incentive is to leave as many hints to authorship as possible without getting DQ'd, such that one receives a ribbon over a mask.

I believe restricting masks only to finalists may be a good solution.

4199591
I think that's a good solution (though I'm not certain that it's actually a real problem).

But I'm also very much on board with restricting guessing only to finalists. Right now, to my specific personality type, there's so much guessing that needs to be done for the full contest that I look at it and throw my hands up. It's more frustrating and tiring to try (because I would want to give it genuine effort) than it's worth. I would wager that this isn't unique to me either, given the pretty low volume of participants bothering with author guessing. Only finalists is somewhat less overwhelming – it deprives the non-finalists of seeing who people guess for their stories, but I think on the whole that information is very very random and unhelpful, particularly for new authors.

But that's all a total aside to something that's already been discussed.

4199591
I don't think anyone is trying to get ribbons instead of masks, so I don't think people deliberately breaking anonymity is that big of an issue.

Have you observed anyone trying to get a ribbon? Because I haven't really seen such, and I have seen people ask me how I guessed it was them.

It is kind of a game.

My bigger concern is lack of participation in author guessing; most stories only seemed to have about 7 people actually bother to guess on them, out of a pool of 31 people who voted. And the success rate in the minific contests is very bad - the winner (me) had a 10% hit rate.

4199888
The chance for a correct guess is 1/N, so the probability that an author will be detected is g/N, where g is the number of guessers, assuming guessers guess randomly. If g is proportional to N (i.e., the number of guessers increase at the same rate as number of entries), then the probability is constant. (Of course, neither of those assumptions hold.)

I'm not sure how to incentivise participation in guessing. It's heavily weighted towards repeat participants who've read all the entries and are familiar with people's styles. This is why events with lots of new participants don't get new guessers—they don't have anything to go off. The feature is by nature only going to attract a small niche.

On top of that, people unable to work their heads around stylometry tools might be intimidated into thinking they're at an insurmountable disadvantage to those who can use those tools. (Possible solution: have the site provide automatic stylometric analysis of stories in the database.)

there's so much guessing that needs to be done for the full contest that I look at it and throw my hands up

Pretty much this. I can handle maybe 20 odd entries but 90 to >100 is really pushing it. D:

4199888
4199967
It looks like only two people filled out a complete ballot of guesses. Out of the over 60 authors, only two even took a guess on every story.

The guessing being limited to finalists might help with that, but it really comes down to participation. The more people that participate, the fewer masks that statistically should be awarded.

I don't use Stylo on mini stories; it's pretty pointless. Even on longer stories, it's not like it gives some kind of huge advantage. I like the guessing, but it seems like people in general don't or don't fill things out all the way and stick to guessing only those items they feel reasonably confident in. I love seeing what people think I wrote and who people think my stories were written by. I thought my stuff was pretty obvious this round, but only TD, on a single guess, got one of my three submissions.

4200008

I don't use Stylo on mini stories; it's pretty pointless. Even on longer stories, it's not like it gives some kind of huge advantage. I like the guessing, but it seems like people in general don't or don't fill things out all the way and stick to guessing only those items they feel reasonably confident in. I love seeing what people think I wrote and who people think my stories were written by. I thought my stuff was pretty obvious this round, but only TD, on a single guess, got one of my three submissions.

Frankly, you get about as much of an advantage out of watching when people submit stories as you do out of stylo, and yes, on minifics, stylo is fairly worthless.

The thing is, it doesn't matter how obviously "you" a story is when other people might write the same thing. The Perfect Cure for the Common Cold was obviously me (and indeed, I believe it was the most obvious story of anyone in the write-off, followed by Horizon's winning story), but no one got me for I Want To Go Home or The Best Medicine (indeed, people agreed that story was written by bookplayer - as strongly as people agreed that the winning story was written by Horizon).

Unless a story obviously is about some topic that a particular user is infamous for, it is nearly impossible to figure them out in the minific rounds. No one guessed One Untended and Apart was guessed by HoofBiting because he hadn't written something like that before (and I'm frankly shocked that no one guessed I wrote that, seeing as I've written faux mythology before). But when you're dealing with people who write a huge variety of things, it becomes very hard to guess which story is theirs. Even with my usual story markings (that is to say, a story which is very heavy in dialogue, with fairly strong voicing), that's not really definitive because other people write stories like that as well (and unhelpfully, there are a number of shippers in the group, so unless it is a ship we're especially closely affiliated with you're guessing blindly - and even if it is, like AppleDash, you're still guessing blindly because most of us are willing to write other ships).

I also noted with some amusement that I was literally the only person who guessed at the authorship of Labor Pains, and I got it right.

The guessing being limited to finalists might help with that, but it really comes down to participation. The more people that participate, the fewer masks that statistically should be awarded.

Honestly, I like having double round guessing, as it means that if you guess an eliminated writer on a finalist story, you know you guessed wrong and can adjust your guesses accordingly. But I can see how the fact that most people probably don't read all the non-finalist stories might discourage them from trying.

Might be best just to ask people why they're not interested in guessing.

I'm apparently as incapable of guessing authors as I am of disguising my writing style, so idc :B

The "Avoided Detection" award is a fun little thing. You write something good, and then sit back and giggle as people incorrectly guess who wrote it. But that fun is a personal kind of fun. It's not really affected by other stories, so other people receiving the award shouldn't really impact on your enjoyment of the guessing.

Unless you've got a "Gotta Collect 'Em All" attitude, that is, and everyone getting the award devalues your enjoyment of your award. But in that case, I'd say, "It's an insignificant award tangential to the point of the competition. Why do you care so much?"

That aside, I do think restricting the guessing to the finalists would be helpful -- at least for the minifics. I think a lot of people, myself included, got put off because there were so many stories to vote on. It was intimidating, overwhelming, a great wall of fiction that could only be scaled with much effort. Cutting that down to the top third would make guessing much more appealing.

Definitely restrict it to finalists, for 2 reasons -

First, it's way less overwhelming.
Second, new authors are less likely to make it to the finals - and the fact is I have 0 templates to guess off a new author short of reading all their existing work. If there's 3-4 of them to guess, well, fine, I can make a go of it, but 'Here are 20 new names, have fun' is just shooting in the dark

4201230
Given that the winner of the last round for best guessing got a totally awesome 10% right, "shooting in the dark" pretty much seems to be par for the course.

There are ribbons and masks?

But hopefully, you see my point. I don't think ponies are actually trying to throw a mask to get the ribbon.

4201449

Yes. Like, I can actually make decent guesses for you and another dozen people or so. But...when there's triple-four times that quantity, it's...yea. Overwhelming, and unfun, and I roll over on it before getting started!

4202169
Just a general note:

Here are the stories I guessed on the basis of "Ha! I know that writing!" from the last write-off:

4th District Court, Canterlot, 11:35 a.m.
Through the Fire and Flames (reinforced by my other methods)
Applejack Kicks It Up a Notch
Rarity's Cure for a Hangover

That's... it, really. The other six I got via thread-stalking. For instance, I got Carrot because Von Snootingham noted that he snuck in at the very end, which meant that his story had to be the very last one submitted.

I got Bradel's story wrong because he tricked me by faking me out on the thread (the clever boy).

Don't be intimidated by the number of folks; no one is capable of identifying everyone's story just by the writing. I only guessed stories written by three writers this time around purely because I knew them.

4202881

What I am saying is there are people I can vibe off. But a total unknown, that is impossible for. So - random guessing is dull.